And this is going to be a big budget reboot. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the two folks behind the Pirates of the Caribbean and The Mask of Zorro screenplays, are in talks to write the script for Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. If they can revive pirates, a long dead and verboten franchise, surely they can do the same for the Lone Ranger.

It will definitely need all the help it can get. The last time the character was revived on the big screen was 1981 in The Legend of the Lone Ranger. It was such a failure that the film's star, Klinton Spilsbury, never worked in Hollywood again. There was a WB television movie in 2003, with the idea of launching a weekly series, but it too failed.

I think there's hope it could succeed this time. Westerns are on the comeback, and audiences seem hungry for this kind of old-school adventure. A witty script is key, but I think it also depends on who they cast as the masked man. Pirates and Zorro both had very fun scripts, but it was the casting that pushed them into the stratosphere. I'm convinced that Pirates would have sunk to the depths without Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush. If Disney and Bruckheimer can land a similar casting coup, then they will be more than halfway there.